We think velocity is new, change is new, and this vast tumult and wave of fear is new. And we are wrong. There has never been firm ground for our lives and our only balm has been a forgetfulness of the changes we have endured.

There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?

The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.

I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.

There can’t be a summing up, a set of commandments, a safe and sacred way. That is the path to ruin. There is appetite, there is the shift of things, the change in weather, the melting of the ice, the new rivers gouged, and the songs we make up to help us keep going.

We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created – civilization, courtesy, decency – is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.

Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.

What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten.

Fear of being killed and fear of killing attracts people to killers and murders. Anyone who has covered homicides for a daily paper soon learns this reality from the questions people ask of a story over coffee.

Humans build their societies around consumption of fossil water long buried in the earth, and these societies, being based on temporary resources, face the problem of being temporary themselves.